In Search of Enemies - A CIA Story - John Stockwell

CIA v. Congress
Southeast Asia, when a prominent senator had been briefed on the
CIA program in detail and even shown upcountry installations, and
later publicly denied any knowledge of the program. If Clark was
going to mess around our program, talking to Africans, then we
damn well better see that our own agents put their best feet forward.
Someone admitted that it wasn't very smart having a cable like
that in the files.* Eventually we could expect the Senate to close the
program down and investigate it. They just might get their hands on
such a cable and kick up a fuss.
Senator Clark returned from his trip skeptical of his CIA briefings
and of the Angola program. He was concerned that we were secretly
dragging the United States into a broad conflict with dangerous,
global implications. Specifically, he was concerned (a) that we were
in fact sending arms directly into Angola; (b) that Americans were
involved in the conflict; and (c) that the CIA was illegally collaborating
with South Africa. However, Clark could not disprove our cover
story and he had few moves to make against us. He could not
precipitate a public debate because he was now muzzled by the CIA
-in receiving the CIA's briefing about IAFEATURE, he had given his
tacit oath not to expose the information he received. The atmosphere
in Congress was such that he would be highly discredited with his
colleagues, jeopardizing his effectiveness on the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, if he spoke out. Dozens of other legislators were
similarly entrapped, as Colby methodically continued his briefings
throughout the program-thirty-five briefings altogether between
January 1975 and January 1976. Systematically, he misled congressmen
about what we were doing in Angola, but nevertheless deprived
them of the option of going public.•• This was the flaw of the
Hughes-Ryan Amendment, aside from the fact that it did not specify
•Although the file on Senator Clark was "soft,', and therefore safe from Freedom
of Information Act demands, the cable also appeared in the IAFEATURE chronological
files and in the computer which records every agency cable.
•*In Honorable Men, Colby claims, in a thesis that recurs throughout the book, that
he worked with determination to make the CIA "an integral part of our democratic
system of checks and balances among the Executive and Congress and the Judiciary,"
by testifying before the congressional committees. And yet, while he was
answering their questions about past CIA operations, he was feeding them patently
false information about the ongoing Angolan operation, depriving them of the full
information which they needed to perform their constitutional role.